Sensing Light

by Mark A. Jacobson

  In the early evening, Marco dozed off. He dreamed he was lying on wet, lumpy life-preservers in the ribbed bottom of a weathered rowboat docked by his family’s lake house. Constantly shifting his weight, moving his arms and legs, he couldn’t find a comfortable position. Soreness in his back woke him. A consolation was this hadn’t been the fugue state he kept slipping into, a dream in which he feverishly strove to unravel a tangled ball of string, his efforts inevitably creating more and more knots until he woke up panting and mentally depleted.

  The bedroom was quiet except for the muted clacks of Kevin typing in the study. On the dresser, Marco saw an envelope Kevin had brought home yesterday, a T cell count result. They had disagreed over its significance—the same argument they had been having for two years.

  After Marco returned from Mexico, he wanted Kevin to be tested, hoping against the odds that Kevin wasn’t infected. Kevin had refused. Knowing wouldn’t change anything, he said. There was no treatment for asymptomatic infection. And there was no risk since at this point mutual masturbation was enough to satisfy them. Kevin took the exasperating high road of stoicism, proclaiming, “There will be an answer. Let it be.”

  The unfairness of denying him exoneration, unlikely as it was, drove Marco to deliver the final blow. He asked Kevin if stubbornness was a family trait. Didn’t his father have the same problem?

  The blood test verified what for Kevin had already been a certainty. His subsequent lectures on how variable the interval between initial infection and onset of symptoms was, how it could as easily have been him who was infected first and transmitted the virus, didn’t help Marco. He had made up his mind long ago that he was the one responsible. Only he had gone to bathhouses before they met.

  Kevin remained optimistic, believing he would be among the lucky few who didn’t get sick. He showed each result to Marco as proof his T cells were consistently above the threshold for life-threatening complications to occur. Marco focused on the downward trend of the numbers.

  Downward trend, Marco repeated, which reminded him there was something he had to do before it was too late. But fatigue overcame him.

  When Marco next awoke, he looked at the clock. It was midnight. He sat upright. What had he forgotten to do?

  His movement woke Kevin.

  “What’s going on?”

  Marco remembered.

  “We have to talk. I’ve put this off too long. It’s time for you to tell me, with no bullshit, what you’ll do after I’m gone.”

  “What I’ll do?”

  “I need to hear you say you’ll find someone.”

  “Marco, please. Let’s not go there.”

  “Do this for me. It’s not a betrayal.”

  “But…”

  “I’m asking for absolution, Kevin.”

  Marco watched the conflict play out in Kevin’s face as he was backed into a corner of submission.

  “Jesus, Marco! Why did I ever believe you meant those diatribes about the church? You are such a fucking Catholic.”

  Kevin cradled Marco’s hand over his heart. They began enumerating the plusses and minuses of every unattached man they knew.

  II

  HERB’S WEEKEND STARTED WITH yard work. A winter storm had passed through on Thanksgiving, clearing the oaks and maples of dead leaves. They now covered his lawn in a layer three inches deep. Martin was helping him rake and shovel the piles into garbage bags. Herb wished they could burn them, but that had been banned in the city years ago. When he was a boy, every autumn the curbs of Long Island had great mounds of smoldering leaves. The tangy scent had thrilled him, triggering bittersweet fantasies of lost fortunes and lost loves. It was one of his happiest childhood memories.

  “Martin, when you were little, didn’t we burn the leaves in December?”

  “Yeah.”

  Martin stopped raking. He gazed into the distance, almost smiling.

  “Remember the smell?”

  “I do.”

  Martin returned to raking. He was thorough and efficient. He finished his half of the lawn well before his father was done and brought an empty bag over to Herb’s side.

  “Give me a second,” said Herb. “I can’t keep up with you.”

  “Right, the long distance runner.”

  “Former long distance runner, who has to bend and squat slowly or he’ll tear something. Hey, what do you get paid for this?”

  “Five bucks an hour.”

  “I think you should renegotiate the rate with your mother. You’re worth more than that.”

  Martin shrugged.

  After the last pile was bagged, Herb surveyed the pristine lawn.

  “Looks great,” he said.

  Martin shrugged again, but this time Herb thought he saw satisfaction in his son’s expression.

  He wished he could find a way to engage Martin besides paying him to do yard work. His son wasn’t interested in sports or movies. What he liked or disliked had become an enigma. He kept to his room with the door closed, and Herb had no idea what he did in there. When asked, Martin would invariably say homework or reading. He was following the precedent his older sister had set. Any conversation with his parents, beyond monosyllabic replies, was limited to school-related issues, which quickly became stale.

  The leaves would be bagged soon, and Herb would have to wait another week for his next chance at bonding.

  “Martin, can we talk?”

  “About what?” Martin said warily.

  “I’m interested in you. I want to know what you like doing.”

  Martin squirmed.

  “I mean what you think you’d like to be doing when you’re grown up, say in ten years.”

  The frontal attack on his privacy withdrawn, Martin relented.

  “I’m not sure. Be in business or a journalist, if it’s not too boring.”

  “There’s more money in business if that’s important to you.”

  This wasn’t a direct question, and Martin didn’t respond.

  “Martin,” he begged.

  Herb couldn’t continue. He knew a plea for them to be closer would only alienate his son.

  At noon, Herb changed into a tuxedo. While driving downtown with Cecilia to the wedding of an in-law’s daughter, he thought about the future of his marriage. In two years, Martin would be away at college. Allison’s departure hadn’t made much impact, but with no kids at home…

  Cecilia interrupted his reverie, warning Herb to be careful about what he said to her cousin Emily.

  “She’s getting divorced. She’s very fragile.”

  “What happened?”

  “All I know is that Joe initiated it. Maybe it’s just incompatibility. Maybe there’s someone else. If so, he’s not telling her.”

  This news was sobering. Emily was their age, and her youngest child had gone off to college in the fall. The empty-nest-divorce syndrome was epidemic, Herb realized. He knew three other couples who had split up right around the time their youngest child reached college age.

  He sneaked a glance at Cecilia. She was absorbed with knitting. Had she been probing him? She had given him an opening. Should he broach the subject, explore what she’d like to do once Martin was out of the house? He considered suggesting a vacation in Europe or China. Her willingness to commit would be a clue. But Herb was feeling risk-averse today. He let the matter drop.

  After the ceremony, Herb followed Cecilia and smiled at whatever people said to him. When this became boring, he went off to look for more interesting conversation. A man he hadn’t seen in years waved to him. Herb knew this was a cousin of Cecilia’s but couldn’t remember his name. They had always referred to him as the Maoist since the toast he had made at their wedding was a quote from the Chairman’s Little Red Book. The man joined him.

  “Herb,” said the Maoist with hale good-fellowship, “You still at the public hospital?”

  “I am,” Herb answered, taking note of the expensive suit and shoes the Maoist was wearing.

  The man cock
ed his head.

  “So what’s that about?”

  Herb returned the puzzled look.

  “I mean, what do you get out of working there?”

  Herb had never been asked this question so directly. Unable to formulate an answer on the spot, he evaded it.

  “It’s good. How about you? What are you up to?”

  “I’m in Manhattan, working on Wall Street.”

  Herb was dumbfounded.

  “What’s that about?”

  “It’s about the market.”

  Seeing Herb confused, he said, “The market is there to be exploited. Unless you want to be oppressed by it, and that’s no longer my preference.”

  As Herb digested this information, he noticed a Rolex peeking out from under the man’s sleeve.

  “So, why are you at City Hospital?”

  Irked, Herb took the offensive.

  “Not for the professional fees, bonuses, or stock options.”

  The Maoist wasn’t insulted. He stared curiously at Herb, waiting to hear more.

  Herb stumbled for the right word. Nothing came to mind. He grabbed at an innocuous adjective, one that wouldn’t sound conceited.

  “It’s fulfilling.”

  As soon as he said it, Herb was embarrassed. He escaped with an excuse about having to find Cecilia.

  Can’t you do better than a lame cliché, he brooded.

  Herb didn’t see himself as an idealist. He wasn’t on some utterly selfless mission to succor the poor and suffering. He aspired to be decent and caring, but he had no illusions of a higher calling.

  The Maoist’s question bothered him. How could he have so little insight into his own motivation? Herb was at a loss to explain why he had worked at City Hospital for fourteen years and had never even toyed with the idea of leaving. It could hardly be noblesse oblige. Though his mother believed she belonged to an elite class, Herb had grown up in the melting pot. He needed loans to pay for college and medical school. His success came from tenacity, not privilege. Thinking of his mother raised another question. Why had she never been critical of his career choice? She must know he could make more money in private practice or the pharmaceutical industry. He once gave her a tour of City Hospital, and the patients she encountered clearly stirred more revulsion than empathy. Why hadn’t she ever pressed him to find a more remunerative job?

  Herb walked into an empty courtyard. There was a table of gifts flanked by poster boards with photos of the bride and groom. He scrutinized the baby pictures. Each one lay in an oblong basket. Bassinets, he thought, smaller versions of cribs. They’re Chinese babies in cribs. The tingling in the back of his neck made him wonder if survival guilt was the unifying diagnosis.

  The combination of a wedding and several glasses of wine stimulated Herb’s libido. At home, Cecilia fell asleep before he could arouse her interest. He awoke early the next morning with a mild hangover and in no mood for sex. He needed to get some exercise.

  Driving across town was interminable. The traffic was being re-routed because of the San Francisco Marathon, which doubly irritated him. This was the first time in ten years he had missed the annual race. His knees could no longer take the pounding.

  Halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog lifted. Sunlight filtered through the dissolving mist, and Herb’s grip on the steering wheel loosened.

  He parked at a Sausalito dock. The same scull he had rented the previous Sunday and had thought about buying all week was available. The bay was calm, only three inches of ripple with no hint of chop.

  Herb lowered himself into the twenty-four-foot fiberglass shell. He cautiously manipulated the long oars until he was in open water. Sliding forward, he dipped the blades under water then extended his legs, pushing the seat backward on its track while pulling the oar handles to his chest and finishing the stroke. Repeating the cycle and seeing the distance he had traveled was as satisfying as running.

  Twenty minutes later he was in the middle of Richardson Bay, a mile from the nearest human being. Panting from this sprint, he savored the isolation. He had left his beeper in the car. No one could make demands on him here. His freedom was limitless. The lure of being able to come here whenever he wanted was irresistible. Herb decided to buy the scull.

  III

  GWEN WAS JARRED AWAKE on Saturday morning by a loud buzz coming from the backyard. She presumed Rick was the responsible party. He had stopped running the week before in preparation for Sunday’s marathon and was accumulating restless energy.

  She found him on a ladder, pruning a pine tree with a chain saw.

  “You nervous about the race?”

  “Nah, I don’t care how fast my time is. You going back to West Oakland tonight?”

  “Just for a few hours.”

  He shook his head ever so slightly.

  “This won’t last long. Once Dina and I work out the routine and are sure it’s safe, we’ll train research assistants to recruit people.”

  He made no comment.

  If challenged, Gwen wouldn’t deny she minimized the time she spent working, nor that she had been putting in even more hours since her grant proposal was funded. Rick never complained when Gwen said she would be home at six and arrived after eight, yet she had a hunch her absence was feeding a grudge. He was far slower to burn than her ex-husband, and it troubled her that she didn’t know where his flash point was.

  Enough self-criticism, she thought. What I do is really important. Rick’s got to accept that and find more gratification in his own life. She liked this attitude in principle but was uneasy about the possibility he might follow the advice and find gratification from another woman.

  At five o’clock, there was plenty of parking on Oakland’s West MacArthur Boulevard. The auto glass and tire shops had closed for the day, and the street’s evening labor force were just beginning to arrive. Gwen and Dina, an African-American nurse practitioner Gwen had hired with her new grant money, parked their outreach van, a durable, dented Ford Econoline, across the street from a stucco motel in need of repainting. They grabbed umbrellas, pepper-spray canisters, bags of safe-sex kits and started searching for study participants.

  The grant was a long shot, but Kevin had made a compelling case. Sooner or later, he said, the public would expect NIH to address the epidemic in women. Although far fewer women than men were infected, the CDC estimated there would be three hundred thousand women in the United States by 1991 who could potentially progress to AIDS. Even if Gwen’s application wasn’t approved, Kevin had argued, she could learn what the reviewers thought of her plan and use that feedback to put together a more competitive proposal when NIH finally did succumb to pressure to support such research.

  Gwen had known her résumé wouldn’t impress the reviewers—academic physicians and PhDs who measured an investigator’s status by the number of her publications in prestigious journals. Serendipitously, the review panel met in October, one week after Surgeon General Everett Koop’s report on AIDS grabbed national attention. Koop was advocating a massive federal effort to increase public awareness of human immunodeficiency virus, the new name of the retrovirus that caused AIDS. The most effective method to prevent spread of HIV infection, he contended, was for everyone to understand how HIV was transmitted. A key component of Gwen’s proposal was precisely this type of outreach to an ignored, high-risk population. She received a fundable score on her first submission. Now, two months later, on the evenings she wasn’t recruiting participants for her study, she drafted proposals for additional money to expand her project to more Bay Area sites.

  Gwen and Dina approached four women dressed in hot pants and low cut blouses. They were huddling together against the cold. Dina invited them to warm up inside the van and learn how to avoid AIDS. None were interested, so Gwen handed each of them a safe sex kit—four condoms, a pamphlet on HIV prevention, and a square of thin latex called a dental dam. Dina gave them a thirty-second lesson in safe fellatio, demonstrating how to insert the dam in her mouth to cre
ate a barrier against semen.

  In the next group, a young Latina with permed, platinum blond hair was willing to listen to them. Gwen explained that she and Dina were researchers who wanted to find out if the AIDS virus had infected girls working the streets. The woman was skeptical but agreed to enroll once told she would be paid for her time.

  After an hour with no further takers, they drove to another motel. Several women shooed them away. Gwen noticed two black women in their thirties eyeing them. Both wore wigs. One was tall and lithe, the other short with large breasts spilling over her spandex top. They seemed more curious than hostile. Gwen suggested making one last attempt.

  “You some kind of ‘I Spy’ or ‘Ebony and Ivory’ team?” asked the tall woman.

  Gwen grinned and segued into a description of HIV infection and its consequences.

  “I heard about that nasty bug,” said the short woman, “but it only gets inside men who go down on each other.”

  “Truth is,” said Dina, “if you have sex with a man who got the bug from using dirty needles or with an infected man who does men and women, and if that man doesn’t use a rubber, you can get infected with HIV.”

  “Hey sister,” said the tall woman, “I don’t do it with no sick johns that gots sores, only healthy ones.”

  “I’m a doctor,” said Gwen, “and I can’t tell who’s infected by looking at them. Lots of infected people look healthy, sometimes for years, before HIV makes them sick. But they can still give HIV to sex partners, and that can happen long before they get sick themselves. The only way you can know for sure if someone has the infection is by having the HIV blood test.”

  Business was slow, and when Dina mentioned the ten dollar reimbursement, the women agreed to talk in the van. They read the consent form and signed without hesitation.

  “I’m happy to answer any questions you have,” said Gwen.

  “These ‘condoms’ you people is pushing,” said the short woman, “I know a girl who swears she don’t do nobody, never, unless they put a rubber on. She got some kind of VD anyway.”

  Dina jumped at this opportunity.